One Process. This Week. That’s It.

The first process I ever wrote down properly wasn’t for a client. It was for myself, in the first few months of running YVO, after I caught myself doing the same client onboarding steps slightly differently every single time and hoping I’d remember what worked.

I sat down one afternoon and just wrote out what I actually did, in order. Nothing fancy. A Google Doc with numbered steps and a couple of screenshots. It took maybe forty minutes. And it changed something I hadn’t expected — the next time I onboarded a client, I wasn’t reconstructing the process from memory under time pressure. I was just following what I’d already worked out, freeing up actual brainpower for the parts of the work that needed it.

That’s really the whole case for documenting one process. Not because your business needs a manual for everything — that’s its own trap, and I’ve seen people spend more time building documentation than the process was ever worth. It’s because the gap between knowing you should write something down and actually doing it is almost always smaller than it feels. It’s not a project. It’s twenty minutes with a blank document and a bit of honesty about what you actually do.

Here’s how I’d pick which one. Think about the process in your business that costs you the most right now — not the most complicated one, the most expensive one. In time. In stress. In the number of times you’ve had to stop what you were doing and explain it to someone. That’s usually a client-facing process, or something that happens monthly and always feels harder than it should.

Write down what you actually do. Not what you think you should do, not the ideal version — the real steps, in the order you actually take them. Include the workaround, the thing you always forget until the last minute, the judgment call you make without thinking about it. That honesty is what makes the document useful later, either to you on a bad week or to someone else entirely.

Then do the part most people skip: put time on the calendar for it. Treat it the way you’d treat a client call, because a business that runs on things only you remember is, in a quiet way, a business that can’t grow past you.

Once it’s written, notice what’s different. Did the next round go faster? Did you catch yourself checking the document instead of relying on memory? That small bit of evidence is what makes documenting the next process feel worth doing too.

If you’d rather not build the structure from scratch, I put together a Business Operations Hub in my Etsy shop — templates for exactly this kind of thing, so you’re customising something rather than starting from a blank page. Link’s in my profile if that’s useful.

Your turn: what’s the one process costing you the most right now, and when this week are you sitting down to write it out?